November 2023 Budget

There have been a few things going on recently and I've had a lot on my mind, so I've been pretty distracted and really haven't been concentrating at all on budgeting and looking after our finances.  So, as expected the spending this month hasn't been great, not helped by the fact that my pay was much less this month due to there being a gap between my old job ending and my new one beginning.

All the usual bills are pretty much the same as before, though our electricity was a little bit more this month, partly due to it being darker for longer now and partly because I've been at home a lot more which naturally means using more electricity no matter how careful I try to be.  Our phone bills were also a little higher this month as we had added roaming to our phones when we went to Brittany, but that will only be for this month.

We have managed to reduce our spending on food this month but it's still much higher than I had originally budgeted for.  Some of it has been us spending on things we really didn't need to spend on, but I have noticed that the cost of food has gone up a bit which means our original budget might actually be a little bit unrealistic.  I'll need to think about increasing this for next year.

We spent more on travel this month as well as I headed down south to help with some family stuff.  For this, I took the bus down (which without a doubt is the cheapest way of travelling far in the UK still) and then my husband came down when he had his days off work.  We also had to spend quite a bit on the car this month with its MOT being due and needing to sort out the advisories that came from that including changing a tyre, renewing our insurance which has gone up quite a bit for everyone now, and renewing our breakdown cover.  I haven't used the money from our car repair sinking fund for these as I want to see if we can get away with leaving that for now.  However, if we need to I'll move the money over.  

This month I also put across my last pension payment from my old job.  I will need to look at moving what pension payment they made into their own scheme into my own account, but hopefully it's just come back to me in my last pay.  I will need to see my wage slip to be sure and I haven't had that yet.

There has also been quite a lot of gift buying this month as there have been a few people's birthdays and we've started buying for Christmas.  I know it's early but I do need to send some of the gifts and I also find Christmas a bit stressful so I like getting it all sorted early so I can just enjoy the run-up.  I am really glad we worked on our Christmas sinking fund during the year as it's made this whole time a lot easier and we don't have to worry so much about money.  We did back peddle a little bit on our personal spending this month and both of us overspent quite a bit.  Specifically me as I spent about £80 in IKEA.  We went to get some things we needed but of course, ended up getting additional things we suddenly realised we needed once we were there.

So not great really.  We weren't able to put any money into our savings this month, which means we only have December to try and reach our new savings goal, but I'm not going to worry too much about that as it was being a little ambitious.  I had a feeling that November wouldn't be great based on how the rest of the year has gone.  However, that could just have been a self-perpetuating idea and it definitely hasn't helped that I haven't made budgeting a priority this year at all.  I'll be back to work in December so it'll be good to start having more money coming in again, but should also reduce what we spend a little bit on electricity and food.  It'll just be Christmas spending now and I can't think of anything extra we'll need to get for ourselves.  I guess we'll see how that goes.